>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. It's I'm Lisa Martin. And it's so great to say that we are doing with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. One of the most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've two sets over a hundred guests to remote studios, lots going on. I've got an alumni back with me and a new guest. Please. Welcome back. Sabina. Jo said the GM of technology partners at AWS and Neil Fowler joins her is the GM of micro-focus AMC. And you're going to tell me what AMC stands for >>Application modernization and >>Connectivity. I love it. Awesome guys. It's great. It's great to see you again in person. Thank you for having us. It's great to have the buzz. I know it's gonna be a little bit hard to hear, but great to have. AWS has done a phenomenal job of getting everyone in here safely. I want to give them kudos to that. So being to talk to me with, it's been a while since I've seen you in person, but talk to me about your current role at AWS. What's going on? >>Yeah, so I'm the general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas. We also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow in the Americas. And one of the great examples of a successful partnership is micro-focus with their solutions across application modernization security, database services, mainframes. >>And so from your perspective, through your lens, how do you think they're performing as a partner? Yes. >>So, um, first of all, kudos to Neil and the entire micro-focus team. They have done a great job leaning in with a cloud first strategy with SAS solutions on AWS and these solutions help customers across application modernization, application, delivery, security, cyber resiliency, database services, and also it performance management. And we've been working with them now for a few years. And in fact, today we have actually 400 customer wins together regulations and then also eight digit annual recurring revenue. They have six active listings in marketplace and all of this is really helping customers move their workloads and modernize their workloads into AWS. >>We've seen that such an acceleration nail in the digital transformation cloud adoption. The pandemic has really been a forcing function for that. There are some silver linings, but talk to me about some of the things that you've seen at micro-focus the last 20 months or so. And how have you helped those 400 customers, you know, getting to that big ARR, how are you helping them with that acceleration? >>Well, I think as you're saying that there's lots of changes in the last 12 to 18 months, some of it brought on by the pandemic and the change in business in business to having to respond, deliver solutions more quickly to the market, as well as remote working. So optimizing and the economic environment of costs, but being there to be more dynamic, it really has caused businesses to have to do something different than just to be able to survive and serve their customers better. That was a >>Big thing that we saw in the very beginning. It was not survival mode. And then of course it wasn't too long when we started seeing those survivors really start to thrive. And you started seeing who were going to be the winners of tomorrow. Cause the thing is every company, these days is a data company. If it's not, it's going to be passed up by competitor, that's right there in the rear view mirror. >>For sure. And so we've got, you know, organizations, so running mainframes, you know, older applications, legacy applications, modernization, where are most industries in terms of adopting that, the mindset, first of all, that they need to change? Well, I think across the whole industry, I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's retail. I mean, if you think about airlines with when the, when the pandemic hit business went down to, unless they've got that elastic nature of flashy to respond to it, but everyone had to bring in new services, new offerings very quickly. So the ability to be able to innovate in their environments and bring more solutions to their customers in a really fast way, you know, they couldn't just sit there and work with what they had. They had to move forward just to be able to stay in the business, but also be able to reduce the costs out of what they're trying to do. So running and transforming at the same time. >>Absolutely. And so how can organizations integrate existing core applications with new technologies to really be able to thrive in today's dynamic market? >>We look at modernization overall. We think of it in sort of three different ways with application process and infrastructure. So with a move to cloud, that's the infrastructure modernization they've immediately got far more access to more scalable dynamic elastic, compute resources, as well as all the technology platforms they have around. And then if you look at the application size and that's where the Microfocus platform comes in, we can help customers actually move those applications forward in terms of making them available through API APIs, maybe as a journey to microservices and cloud native. But once that core business logic and that data is available, it can be integrated into artificial intelligence machine learning and actually rained out the whole solution. So the final part of that from the process modernization, if you, as they're developing these applications with new tools, new ranges, in terms of where they can deploy on the AWS platform, they can automate the build deployment and operations so that all those existing applications and they were running on to contemporary platform with full access to the technologies that were available. >>That's fantastic and so necessary for businesses in any industry. So can you talk about some of the different business units of micro-focus? Are there any ones in particular that you want to call out? >>Yeah, so we work with them across all of their business units, but some of them that come to my mind is of course, Neil and team are doing a great job with application modernization and connectivity, really helping customers modernize the applications. And as customers are modernizing the applications, their cyber resiliency business unit is helping customers secure those applications. And then they also have their it operations management bridge product listed in marketplace. And then just since September are verdict a business unit launch Vertica accelerator on AWS. So I think they have a very holistic story to help customers >>On AWS. Talk to me a little bit, Neil, about cyber resiliency. We have seen such a dramatic change in cybersecurity in the threat landscape the last 20 months. I think I saw a stat recently that ransomware was up almost 11 X in the first half of 2021. Every, every day that companies had had a company, that data is gotta be secure. It's no longer a nice to have. That is a core requirement. How are you helping customers achieve that cyber? >>Well, the thing is, I mean, as you say, across the whole spectrum from cyber, from, from the identity access management through data encryption, through data protection, it's not, it's not a nice to actually say it's not a nice to have Kate take capability. You really have to have an integrated solution to be able to manage access control it, and also generating the events in terms of being able to, if anyone tries to get into the systems and log it because, you know, before, by the time you've discovered something it's too late, so you really need a combined solution for multi-factor authentication to really take it to that next level. >>Absolutely. Right. Once you've detected it, it's too late. And I mean, with ransomware as a service, cyber criminals are getting so much more sophisticated and also more brazen. There's so much money in it that the security front is, is I think even more interesting now than it's ever been. Talk to me about some joint customers and how you've helped them together with AWS with micro-focus achieve some of those key outcomes that you were talking about earlier. Well, I think >>Obviously with AWS as a platform has quite over a technology solutions going in, what we often find with our customers is a lots of, um, they're coming from an existing on-prem solution. So they need that hybrid model. So as part of taking that forward, been able to have that integrated solution that allows them to work both on-prem and as part of the cloud, most of it all being hooked up now, even that from even down to the, uh, as they're developing the applications now to do static code analysis, to help those applications be more secure with things like 40 pound demand, as well as integrating internet security platform for multifactor. So I think as you know, it's a combination of Brunel to bridge between all the different technologies, but have one single view of mail to protect the whole real estate, multiple layers for both external and internal threat. So that's, that's the other thing you also need to take into and can be able to protect all, all layers multi-layered approach. >>Absolutely. But you're right. The internal threats is something that we don't talk about as much, but that is obviously a substantial problem for organizations and most, if not any industries to be, to talk to me a little bit about, let's kind of get into the, the responsibilities that you have a little bit more in there. You've got responsibility for multiple solutions segments at AWS. You told me before we went live, you have 50 meetings this week. My goodness. And since day one, it taught all good. It's fun, fun. It is. Talk to me about AWS approach to partnering. What does it look like? What are some of the things that you think are really critical components? Yeah. >>So as you may have heard, we always start with the, at Amazon and AWS, we start with the customer. We work backwards when we are relaunching our products, our programs or services, you really go and ask the customers, what do you want us to develop? Where do you want us to focus the resources? It takes a lot of discipline to do that, but it's something that where we really want to walk the talk and we use the same approach with our partners when we started to work with micro-focus, we really kind of want to make sure that what we are working on together is what customers want, because we firmly believe that once you lay that foundation of that solution, you can scale your business a lot more quicker. Your story is a lot more simple and the customers are going to find a lot of value in what you are doing together. So it's really all about the customer for us. It is >>Absolutely critical, right? That's the whole point that the whole reason that we're here now, talk to me a little bit about maybe some cultural alignment with AWS, that customer first customer obsession. It sounds like at Microfocus, very similar. >>Absolutely. I mean, the way that we always think about how we're building our products, it's all around customer centric innovation. So that aspect of trying to make sure that we can solve what the business, understanding what the customers are trying to do to then help develop, to deliver solutions that meet that and that combination of a, the way that we look at it from that infrastructure modernization and the range of technologies that are available and that relentless focus on making customer successful is so key. But we have to make sure that that collaboration works together to make sure that the solutions align and we're helping customers get there together >>In your customer conversations. I imagine they've changed quite a bit during the pandemic with so many things being escalated to the C-suite to the board. How have your, how important is that cultural alignment between AWS and Microfocus from your customer's perspective? Is it something that comes up fairly often? Well, >>It's, it's a, I think it, when you actually get a mismatching culture, it's more obvious. So don't think that necessarily people are looking for it to say, I need organizations, but if you're not thinking the same way, you're not behaving the same way and actually partnering. I think that partnering part of it is really important because you're both working together to come up with that desired outcome. So I think it's more, more obvious when it isn't a good match as opposed to what it looking for that particular site. But I think that's a really key aspect in the sense of working together to help that customer be successful. >>Right? That's a great point that you bring up, but it's probably more obvious when it isn't working than when it's beautifully aligned, falling into place and really focused on that customer. So what are some of the things that attendees can, can feel and see and learn at the micro-focus booth at this year's reinvent nail, >>As well as obviously the key Roundup application modernization, where we're looking at the mainframe modernization on the site, we've got the full range of the Microsoft booth in terms of cyber resilience, as well as our, uh, item, my top, uh, it operations management or ADM portfolios. So we've got a lot of technologies which we can learn about in the booth interactive as well as all by experts to understand how we can do all these things and work together as part of the AWS platform to be able to deliver those solutions. >>Excellent. I'm sure there will be plethora of, of knowledge shared at the booth there. Last question, Neil, for you, talk to me about the vision going forward with the partnership. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we end 2021 and go into hopefully what is a better year, 2022? >>You know, one of the key things, you know, especially range, no one might, my passionate areas is helping our customers really look in terms of building the platform of the future. We can help solve their customer the problems today, but we're really trying to create that innovation platform to going through. So again, that combination of the technologies that we can bring to help our customers and the breadth and the investment that AWS continue making in the platform, those two combinations really helps us help our customers, not just solve today's problems, who really move into the forward to be the platform for innovation for the next decade. >>And that's really critical that that future ready state that is so undefined most of the time, I mean, none of us saw the pandemic coming, all right. That was a complete shock, but to be able to partner together, to help your customers really set up the foundation to be innovative as things happen that we can't even predict is really critical. So congratulations on your 400 customer wins your eight digit ARR. That's fantastic. Yes, we thank you so much for joining us on the queue, talking about the Microfocus AWS partnership and all of the successes that you guys have had. Great job. And I hope that you have cough drops and a lot of water this week. Sabina. I hope you do too guys. Thanks for joining me. Pleasure for my is I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.